Cairo-Dock is a pretty, fast and customizable desktop interface. You can see it as a good alternative/addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel, etc.
(For more details about the Cairo-Dock sessions and more screenshots, please have a look at a previous article: here)

TL;DR: main changes

Menus: added the possibility to customise them

Style: unified the style of all components of the dock

Better integration with Compiz (e.g. when using the Cairo-Dock session) and Cinnamon

Applications Menu and Logout applets will wait the end of an update before displaying notifications

Various improvements for Applications Menu, Shortcuts, Status-Notifier and Terminal applets

The most visible change is the ability to customise the menus. You can change the background, the shape, etc. and even use your own css file (a menu.css file in your current_theme folder) for those who want to change every tiny details

Note that the dock now has the possibility to use an unified style. Either a custom one (on the left) or based on the current GTK3 theme (on the right):

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You can easily change the style from the config panel:

(there are more options in the advanced mode of the configuration panel of the dock and you can choose to use the global style (or not) for many options of different applets)

The default theme has also been updated in order to use a custom style with a black background, it now looks like that:

These screenshots have been made with 'Default-Panel' and 'Default-Single' themes available in the Theme manager, but please remember that Cairo-Dock is fully customisable. You can easily change its look, simply have a look at the theme manager, your favourite search engine, DeviantArt, Gnome-Look, etc.

Other improvements

Many other tiny improvements and bugs fixes have added to this version in order to fix some details that can help the user, e.g.:

There is a better integration with your Window Manager, e.g.:

If it's the first time you're using our Cairo-Dock Session but your current dock only has one panel, you'll see a proposition to switch to the 'Default-Panel' theme.

When adding new desktops from the Switcher applet, a special case has been added for Compiz user to add workspaces instead of desktops (not the same concept) and save the new settings.

On Cinnamon, the dock will open more specific applications (e.g. to change sound settings, lock the screen, logout, etc.)

Applications Menu and Logout applets will wait for the end of an update of the system before displaying notifications, e.g.:

When installing a new software, the Applications Menu will propose to you to open this new application at the end of the installation of all applications (of course, you can disable this behaviour)

When upgrading your kernel (or a few other packages), you will see a notification only at the end of the upgrade of all packages which will propose you to reboot your computer. If you try to reboot your computer during an upgrade, the dock will show you a warning.

A few options have been added (e.g. in the Terminal applet) and other details have been improved. For a complete ChangeLog, please have a look to our commit messages

Note that GTK 2 support has been dropped in this new release. If you still don't support GTK 3, please install Cairo-Dock 3.3.

Switch from BZR to Git on Github

We just switched from BZR to Git on Github.
It's absolutely not because BZR sucks! BZR is a great distributed version control system, easy to use and intuitive. For example, by default you commit all you changes, no need to use a "stage" or add an option. If you want to send your changes to another branch, simply add the new name when you push it. If you want to do two things in parallel, simply duplicate your folder. If you want to undo your commit, simply use the understandable uncommit command. If you want to undo your current changes, simply use revert command (by default, it will create backup files). If you just need a snapshot of a branch and still have the possibility to be synced, there is an option to not clone the entire branch. And many other details!
Plus also all other tools to manage Ubuntu's .deb packages.

Of course, you can do all these stuff with Git but sometime it's not so easy and not so intuitive. For example, you can do many things with the checkout command, maybe too many things. You can have a better control of your remote repos but it's a bit more complex. You can add aliases, you can switch from a branch to another without duplicating any folder, there are a lot of options, etc. but it's maybe not so useful for projects with only a few contributors.

So, why did we switch? Mostly to be on Github. Not because it's Github but we hope that it will improve our visibility, we hope we will have more contributors (because we're looking for new contributors, feel free to fork ). Many people are using Git, many people already have a Github account and there are a lot of documentations and tools about Git and Github. We can even use the web interface to edit file and create pull requests!
Another interesting thing is that we can easily review the code on Github by adding comments linked to some lines in the code. And we can easily use other services thanks to Git's Hooks (e.g. to automatically build and test the entire project on Travis when there are new changes, etc.)

Note that we will only use Github to host the code and your future pull requests. Please continue to report bugs/ideas/questions on Launchpad or on our forumAlso, if you still want to continue to use BZR (e.g. if you have scripts and you just want to compile the development version of the dock), you can continue to use BZR because these branches are now synced with our Git repositories: lp:cairo-dock-core, lp:cairo-dock-plug-ins, lp:cairo-dock-plug-ins-extras. But of course, if you were already using these BZR branches, you'll need to re-download them.

Hello EGL and Wayland

Cairo-Dock has now a basic EGL and Wayland support. For more details about that, please have a look to our previous article

How to install

Installation is very easy, simply follow the wiki, depending on your distribution: Wiki: installationE.g. for Ubuntu users, you can simply copy/paste these 3 lines into a terminal: